I am guessing /u/The_Alaskan will show up, but like the Russians... I am here first!

The relationships between the Russians and the Native people of Alaska was a strange beast. I guess, that is a similarity with the other European colonizers in the Americas, though. Early on, the relationship was mainly a trade relationship. The Russians were after fur, the Native's would supply the fur in exchange for goods. The problem became that there was exploitation by the Russians towards the Native population. The Russian American Company, the Crown Company that managed the Alaskan Colony, would often force high quotas or sales, under threats of violence. This led to some horrific travesties.

An Aleut sent the following to the Tsar in 1799.

"The Russians are coming to America and to our Fox Islands and Andreanof Island to hunt sea and land animals. We receive them in friendly fashion, but they act like barbarians with us. They seize our wives and children as hostages, they send us early in the spring, against our will, five hundred versts (about 330 miles) away to hunt otters, and they keep us there until fall, and at home they leave the lame, the sick, the blind, and these, too, they force to process fish for the Company and to do other Company work without receiving any pay . . .The remaining women are sent out on Company labor and are beaten to death. They are removed by force to desert islands, and the children are taken away from those who walk with crutches, and there is no one to feed them."

However, the Russians did do things somewhat differently, especially in the regards to language. I wrote a paper on a priest who in 1826 came to the Aleutian Islands and developed a writing system for the Aleut people, in their own native language. He used it to teach the Orthodox Catechism, and ultimately the Orthodox Bible. Ivan Veniaminov , or Saint Innocent as he would be known as later, also established schools that taught in the Aleut language, using his dictionary and grammar. This was categorically different than the English and later American approach to Native Language, and also different the Spanish policy. The schools actually got shuttered after the purchase of the Alaskan colony in 1867 by the Americans, and the Aleut language wouldn't be used for instruction again till the 1960s.

To kind of tie it all up though, the Russians did follow some aspects of normal colonizer behavior by oppressing and dominating the local population, however the large amount of that was done during the early years of the colony was lessened by the time that Saint Innocent arrived in the 1820s. Also, keep in mind that the population of Russians in Alaska was always very low, but there was also interbreeding between the indigenous population and the Russians. It was mainly a trading colony, and wasn't, like the US colonies, used as a farming, or population colony. Finally, the Russians did establish a system for languages of the native population was quite forward thinking, for the time, and led to there being written languages of the Aleut, and the Tlingit, when the American policy began to slowly crush Native Languages farther South.

University of Washington Press has a new book out this month, Empire Maker by Kenneth N. Owens and Alexander Yu. Petrov that I'd recommend. There's also Lydia Black's Russians in Alaska, Kodiak Kreol by Gwenn Miller, Grinyev's The Tlingit Indians in Russian America, and Russians in Tlingit America by several authors.

There's no universal experience, but the Russian experience with North American Natives can, I suppose, fall into three categories: Domination, Resistance, and Peace.

In southwestern Alaska, including the Aleutians, the Russians subdued and conquered first the Aleuts and then the Sugpiaq/Alutiiq people of the Kodiak archipelago. This was a violent conquest, not unlike Russian expansion through Siberia in the century before Vitus Bering's expedition spread knowledge of Alaska. (Note that he was not the first Russian to visit Alaska, as many people continue to believe.)

From the 1740s through 1799, a variety of trading companies competed in Russian America. Their goal was furs, which could be sold to Chinese buyers for high prices. The income from those sales could buy Chinese goods, which could then be sold in Europe for a lucrative profit.

Many of these companies were formed by coalitions of Irkutsk merchants for a single voyage, and the partnership dissolved after the profits (frequently, the losses) rolled in. It was a risky business that could fall apart at any moment if a storm sprang up at the wrong time or an inexperienced captain drove his ship on the rocks.

Because most of these companies were temporary affairs, they didn't care about niceties. They slaughtered as many sea otters and fur seals as they could, they enslaved as many Native hunters as they could, and they generally behaved barbarously, with disastrous consequences for the Aleuts and Sugpiaq, whose resistance crumbled in the face of firepower.

By the end of the 18th century, Natalia Shelikova successfully convinced Imperial officials that a monopoly was necessary to rein in the traders. This resulted in the charter for the Russian-American Company, which was granted a monopoly over the Alaska fur trade.

At the same time, the new company was interested in pushing into southeast Alaska. The Russians had hunted almost to extinction the sea otters in the Aleutians, southwest and southcentral Alaska, so they needed new hunting grounds.

Aleksandr Baranov, the head of the RAC in America, was also among those who believed there was a golden opportunity to establish Russian dominance over this corner of America by establishing a true colonial infrastructure. He had support from prominent figures, but wrecked ships, dissenting workers and a perennial lack of supplies and settlers foiled that dream.

Nevertheless, he still tried to press forward, establishing forts at Yakutat and what we know today as Sitka. The Tlingit and Eyak were better organized than the Aleuts and Alutiiq had been, and they resisted the Russian incursions. The Yakutat Tlingit successfully attacked and burned the fort there. The Sitka-area Tlingit attacked and burned the fort there, but unfortunately for them, their success coincided with the arrival of the first Russian ships to visit Alaska in five years. Reinforced, Baranov was able to counterattack the Tlingit and rebuild his trading post on the site of the former Tlingit village.

This place became New Archangel, the capital of Russian America, but its success was limited. The Tlingit successfully embargoed most Native trade with New Archangel, and only a handful of heavily armed hunting parties were able to penetrate that embargo to take sea otters in Southeast Alaska. Instead, it was the Tlingit who benefited, trading sea otter skins with visiting American and British traders who, like the Russians, took advantage of the Chinese trade.

With Southeast Alaska locked up, the RAC set its sights farther south, to California. Parties of Alutiiq and Aleut hunters would be transported south aboard Russian ships or American ships under contract to hunt sea otters as far south as Baja California. This was lucrative again, and Baranov set up Fort Ross in northern California as both an outpost for these expeditions and an agricultural colony to feed Russian America.

In point of fact, it failed as an agricultural colony but succeeded as a trading post. Russians there kept good relations with the California Natives and the Spanish missionaries in the area who did have food surpluses to trade.

Similarly, Russian ships and traders under contract traveled to Hawaii, the great transshipment point across the Pacific, where they traded with Kamehameha. Baranov and the Hawaiian king traded gifts and kept up diplomatic ties.

By 1820 and the time of Baranov's death, things had largely stabilized in Alaska. Peace overtures kept large-scale combat from reoccurring in Southeast Alaska, and many of the Natives of the Aleutians and Kodiak archipelago became Russianized as a creole class developed through marriages between Russian men and Native women. The Tlingit stayed independent, thanks to weapons traded to them by Americans and British, and the fact that the Russians were never strong enough to militarily challenge them.

The RAC was intent on profit, and if that meant making peace with Native inhabitants, so be it. If it meant enslaving them, so be it. If it meant trading peacefully, so be it.